The Spanish born, New York based artist Pablo Garcia Lopez makes mixed media reliefs and sculptures which evoke hybrid forms resonating with Baroque imagery, biological forms, and at times Victorian delicate ornaments. His Spanish heritage, coupled with his background in biochemistry and Neuroscience largely inform his visual vocabulary and themes.
In the studio in Newark, NJ, 2018. Photo courtesy of the artist.
New Jersey and Manilla based artist Katrina Bello draws on memories of her childhood experiences in the Philippines. Ranging from small to large scales. her drawings depict geological layers as vast fields of textures and colors – alluring us to sense the awe in vastness while also inviting us to get close and sense the fragility and tenderness in each detail.
Aisha Tandiwe Bellis interested in the many manifestations of the traps of race, sex, and class. She makes drawings, paintings, ceramic sculptures, installations, and performance work that examine the metaphors and the allegory that this trap manifests. In her newest work Aisha Tandiwe Bell’s is looking at how one might negotiate traps, utilizing shape shifting, and code-switching as well as looking at identifying markers that both separate and unify. She says, “I am a Black African American Jamaican Woman Artist Wife and Mother. These are all categories that I consistently juggle and negotiate in a white male dominated space.” Aisha Tandiwe Bell is participating in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center.
Melissa Stern is an artist, working in mixed materials and across genres. She is interested in ideas that are simultaneously funny and dark- that is, “work that might make you smile or laugh, but with a wee bit of discomfort,” as she puts it. Much of her work of recent years focuses on home and childhood and the ways in which our childhoods and our memories haunt our lives. She works in clay, found objects, wood, metal collage and various drawing materials. Her goal is that the materials she uses are at the service of the ideas. On a different note she says, “I am an only child, raised by older parents who were first generation Americans. My mother desperately wanted to be ‘American’. My father was very connected to his European heritage. This push and pull; between belonging and being an outsider has profoundly influenced my life as an artist.” Melissa Stern is participating in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center.
Diana Schmertz has always been interested in systems that people create to organize what they perceive in the world around them — based in science, religion, psychology, philosophy or politics. The artist says that no matter how cerebral a system or an idea may appear, it is always experienced through our physical senses and in order to communicate balance between reason and senses, she paints imagery of the body expressing emotional understanding juxtaposed with systems of verbal and/or mathematical reasoning. In Domestic Brutes, the women group show at Pelham Art Center Diana Schmertz shows a painting installation. Her virtual artist talk hosted by PAC is scheduled for October 8th.
Manju Shandler working on Persistent Mothers in her studio in Brooklyn, NY 2020. Photo Stephen Estrin.
Manju Shandler creates symbolic art that speaks to current events. Building upon established storylines from myth, religion, and history, her mixed media artworks create richly layered narratives that reflect on our dense and complicated times. Shandler believes people are natural storytellers that make sense of the world through by mining both personal experience and collective memories that have been passed down. Her work dips into this well. Training as a theatre designer helps her to envision installations and her background as a puppet builder informs how she approaches building objects. Identifying as a mother seeps into everything she does.
In her drawings, paintings, and installations North Carolina based artist Heather Gordon maps the poetry of life using mathematical elements like numbers and geometry to coax narratives from information related to data of place, time and physical properties. In her collaborative projects she has extended her practice to large scale site-specific installations based on elaborate research, often including sculptural, performance and movement elements which altogether result in multifaceted and thought provoking projects that prompt the visitor’s intellectual and visceral engagement. In this interview Heather Gordon sheds some light on her nine-foot-high site-specific mural on the large exterior window of the GreenHill gallery to be completed late September. Heather Gordon’s public art initiative isthe first of a group of works by the artist at GreenHill Center for North Carolina Art, as part of the Shift Happensart installation serieswhich aims to explore art engagement at a time of social distancing.
Jana Astanov is an interdisciplinary artist, a poet and an independent curator born in Poland, and living in the US. She is a founder of CREATRIX Magazine, portal for creative expression focused on art, activism and spiritual practice. Her work includes photography, poetry, performance art, sound art, and installation. In her work, she utilizes spiritual traditions, somatic movement, sound art, ritualistic theatre and Astrofeminism, a term she has developed through her character Yannanda The One Who Speaks With The Stars. Together with her partner Niko van Egten she co-created an electronic music group ASTRALOOP featuring her poetry in dark electronic arrangements. She has performed at Tate Modern, Smack Mellon Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, Venice Biennale, Documenta 2017, and many other galleries, festivals and independent venues worldwide. She is also the author of five collections of poetry: Antidivine, Grimoire, Sublunar, The Pillow Book of Burg, and Birds of Equinox. In this interview for Art Spiel Jana Astanov discusses her ideas on performance art and specifically on her most recent upcoming curatorial project ALEMBIC: Body and Spirit. Live Art as Healing Art.
Padma Rajendran, Along the way, 2019, Dye on silk with stitching, dimensions varied, photo courtesy of the artist
Malaysian born and New York based artistPadma Rajendran works in diverse media yet currently views paper and fabric as her primary materials. She highlights the portable nature of paper and fabric, along with their significance as “keepers of culture, comfort, and call upon the function of the decorative”. Padma Rajendran shares here some insight on her work, what brought her there and where she is heading from here.
Installation view of ecofeminism(s) curated by Monika Fabijanska, left to right: Eliza Evans, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Hanae Utamura, Betsy Damon, Aviva Rahmani, and Jessica Segall. Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, June/July 2020 (photos: Andreas Vesterlund).
The exhibition ecofeminism(s), on view at Thomas Erben Gallery from June 19th to July 24th, will reopen Tuesday, September 8th through Saturday, September 26th, 2020. Curator Monika Fabijanska brings together works of sixteen artists in graceful, yet dense and thoughtful way as a museum show would. Albeit in the gallery consistently staging pivotal and sophisticated exhibitions,including among many others shows of Senga Nengudi, Dona Nelson, Painting Forward and Looped and Layered – Contemporary Art from Tehran.
